What Is BIP-110? A Data-Bitcoin Soft Fork That Nearly No Miner Supports

The proposal grandfathers UTXOs created before activation, so existing coins can still move under the old rules indefinitely . It also temporarily disables certain Taproot features that could be used for data embedding .

Activation Threshold & Deadline

The proposal originally required a 55% miner signaling threshold during any 2,016-block difficulty adjustment period for a Miner-Activated Soft Fork (MASF) lock-in . Miner support never approached that level .

A fallback User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) flag day is set around block 961,632, which corresponds to approximately August 8, 2026 . At that block height, enforcing nodes would begin rejecting blocks that do not signal support — regardless of hashrate share — raising the risk of a chain split .

Current Signaling — Negligible Miner Support

Miner signaling has been effectively nil throughout the signaling period, which began in March 2026 .

Major pools — Foundry USA (~28% of network hashrate) and Antpool — have publicly opposed signaling . F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun explicitly rejected the proposal in February 2026 . Ocean Pool is the only notable pool that turned on BIP-110 signaling, using an opt-out model as of July 15, 2026 .

Foundry's Hashrate Vote

On July 17, 2026, Foundry Digital (the world's largest mining pool by hashrate, controlling roughly 237 EH/s or ~28% of the network) began soliciting a vote from its mining clients on whether to signal BIP-110 .

Key mechanics of the vote:

• Each client's voting weight is determined by their 10-day average hashrate (calculated from July 6–15) .
• Foundry stated it will follow the majority of hashrate-weighted votes in deciding the pool's signaling position going forward .
• If over 51% of the voting hashrate supports BIP-110, the pool will signal "Yes" with 100% of its blocks; otherwise, no support signal will be issued .

This vote is significant because Foundry's hashrate alone could meaningfully shift the signaling percentage, though even a yes vote from all Foundry miners would still fall well short of the 55% MASF threshold .

The Governance Debate: Censorship vs. Original Purpose

The proposal has deeply divided the Bitcoin community along two sharply opposing lines:

Critics argue BIP-110 is a form of censorship and a dangerous precedent — that Bitcoin should remain permissionless, and that restricting data in transactions violates the principle that "the chain cannot be censored" . Some technical critics also argue that because BIP-110 would reject previously valid transaction types, it is technically a hard fork, not a soft fork . Major pools and large miners have largely sided with this view by declining to signal .

Supporters argue BIP-110 restores Bitcoin's original purpose as peer-to-peer digital cash — that Ordinals-era data spam has degraded the user experience, raised fees for regular transactions, and bloated the UTXO set. They see the fork as a temporary, surgical correction rather than a permanent change in philosophy . The proposal's author frames it as a one-year measure intended to reduce data-embedding methods while giving the network time to develop a better long-term solution .

Likely Outcome: All Indicators Point to Failure

As of July 17–18, 2026, all indicators point toward BIP-110 failing to achieve meaningful miner adoption. Ocean Mining VP Jason Hughes publicly stated the proposal is "on track to fail" with miner signaling stuck below 1% .

Without a sudden surge in hashrate signaling before block 961,632, the UASF flag day could still trigger a low-hashrate chain split — but most analysts expect the fork to lack the economic weight to persist . The result would likely be a short-lived minority fork that fails to attract sustained mining or transaction volume.

For now, BIP-110 represents one of the most contentious governance battles in Bitcoin's recent history — a test of whether the network's consensus rules can be temporarily tightened to restrict non-financial use, or whether Bitcoin's principle of permissionless innovation will prevail.